The invention concerns a device and method to generate intense and brief variations, but nevertheless predetermined and controlled, of magnetic pressure, especially of at least one gigapascal and able to range up to five terapascals, in a period able to be between 1 ns and 500 ns, inside a sample of a solid material.
The application of these intense brief pressure variations inside a solid material make it possible to study their behaviour and analyse the various complex phenomena which may occur when the solid material is subjected to extreme stresses (phase changes, determination of state equations and laws of behaviour, degradations, instabilities, breakages . . . ).
Known devices able to generate intense and brief variations inside solid materials (cf. “COMPORTEMENT DYNAMIQUE SOUS CHOC DE LA MATIERE” by R. Dormeval and others, Scientific and Technical Review for the Management of military applications, issue 5, September 1992, pp 77-90) consist of impact generators (launchers, explosives, electromagnetic guns . . . ) or diamond anvil presses. In the first case, it is extremely difficult to accurately control the parameters of the pressure profile and it is impossible to generate isentropic pressure variations. In particular, there exists an electric gun including a parallel flat line fed by an electric current pulse generator so as to make a cutting aluminium sheet explode and projecting an isolation disk at high speed. The explosion of the sheet basically occurs under the effect of the heat energy resulting from the rise of the intensity of the current which lasts more than 600 ns and circulates inside the entire thickness of the sheet which is less than skin thickness. As for diamond anvil presses, these are extremely complex expensive devices which also have the drawback of only allowing a small amount of space around the sample, thus limiting the possibilities for analysing mechanical behaviour.